A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

CREDO REDUX PART ONE

Today I
begin a several part essay that may take me a while, so settle down.These remarks are prompted by a comment [see
below] offered by Scott to the original posting of my Credo on November 28,
2010.[Close readers will note that my Credo
thus precedes the famous speech by now-Senator Elizabeth Warren in which she said
essentially the same thing, without however the tagline from Marx.]I shall be alluding to, and at certain points
even quoting directly from, my essay "The Future of Socialism," which
you can find by clicking on the box.net link at the top of this blog and then
searching the archive of my occasional writings.First the Credo:

Credo

We human beings live in
this world by thoughtfully, purposefully, intelligently transforming nature so
that it will satisfy our needs and our desires. We call this activity of
transforming nature "production," and it is always, everywhere, inescapably
a collective human activity. Every moment that we are alive we are relying on
what those before us have discovered or invented or devised. There is no
technique, however primitive, that is the invention of one person alone. Like
it or not, we are all in this life together. Even those giants of industry who
think of themselves as self-made men are completely dependent for their empire
building upon the collective knowledge and practice of the entire human
species.

All of us eat grain we have
not grown, fruit we have not planted, meat we have not killed or dressed. We
wear clothes made of wool we have not combed and carded, spun or woven. We live
in houses we have not built, take medicines we neither discovered nor produced,
read books we have not written, sing songs we did not compose. Each of us is
completely dependent on the inherited knowledge, skill, labor, and memory of
all who have gone before us, and all who share the earth with us now.

We have a choice. We can
acknowledge our interdependence, embracing it as the true human condition; or
we can deny it, deluding ourselves into thinking that we are related to one
another only as parties to a bargain entered into in a marketplace. We can
recognize that we need one another, and owe to one another duties of generosity
and loyalty. Or we can pretend to need no one save through the intermediation
of the cash nexus.

I choose to embrace our
interdependence. I choose to acknowledge that the food I eat, the clothes on my
back, and the house in which I live are all collective human products, and that
when any one of us has no food or clothing or shelter, I am diminished by that
lack.

There are two images alive
in America, competing for our allegiance. The first is the image of the lone
horseman who rides across an empty plain, pausing only fleetingly when he comes
to a settlement, a man apparently having no need of others, self-sufficient [so
long as someone makes the shells he needs for his rifle or the cloth he needs
for his blanket], refusing to acknowledge that he owes anything at all to the
human race of which he is, nonetheless, a part.

The other is the image of
the community that comes together for a barn-raising, working as a group on a
task that no one man can do by himself, eating a communal meal when the day is
done, returning to their homes knowing that the next time one of their number
needs help, they will all turn out to provide it.

These images are simple,
iconic, even primitive, but the choice they present us with remains today, when
no one rides the plains any more, and only the Amish have barn-raisings. Today,
as I write, there are tens of millions of Americans who cannot put a decent
meal on the table in the evening for their families, scores of millions
threatened with the loss of their homes. And yet, there are hundreds of
thousands lavishing unneeded wealth on themselves, heedless of the suffering of
their fellow Americans, on whose productivity, inventiveness, and labor they
depend for the food they eat, the clothing they wear, the homes they live in,
and also for the luxuries they clutch to their breasts.

The foundation of my
politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex
world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see
just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public
policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a
community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one
another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.

If all of this must be
rendered in a single expression, let it be: From each of us according to his or
her ability; to each of us according to his or her need.

---------------------------------

Four days after this originally appear, Scott said:"But you're not advocating
market abolitionism are you? That's just throwing out the baby with the
bathwater."When I asked what
market abolitionism is [thus revealing my ignorance], he replied:"I already mentioned it before on this
blog but I'll explain it again. Market abolitionism is the idea that all market
functions should be replaced by planning. The most famous proponent of this
view is Michael Albert and you can read him here: http://books.google.es/books?id=JfNi7V9WnhYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=michael+albert+parecon&source=bl&ots=KRRhOF5iAu&sig=Y5gNn97YOmeygff2462auqqLmRA&hl=es&ei=1Av4TPvpHceHhQeMy_jFDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

I think that a marketless world based entirely on planning would turn society
into a Brazil-type dungeon of bureaucracy and oppression. This is why I keep
asking people on the left what exactly their views are of the marketplace.
Seeing as how I generally hear nothing but hostility towards them can I really
unreasonably assume that the logical conclusion of their views would be
supplanting all market functions with planning?"

This provocative comment by Scott [I hope he or
she is still reading my blog -- I hate the anonymity of this entire medium]
triggered a series of reflections during my walk this morning, and led to my
decision to expand the response I had originally planned into a full-scale
disquisition.

One of the most effective ideological dodges of apologists
for capitalism has been their successful substitution of the phrase "free
market economy" for "capitalist economy" in our public
discourse, as though "capitalism" and "free markets" were synonymous.So before we can get anywhere in this
discussion, we must sort out that confusion.

A market is a public space in which people meet to exchange
goods for goods, goods for money, and money for goods.[I leave virtual markets and such matters
aside for the moment.]There have
certainly been markets for all of recorded history ["Let's go down to the
Agora and see whether Socrates is there"] and in all likelihood for a long
time before the invention of writing.One finds markets in slave economies [including slave markets, needless
to say] and in feudal economies, as well as in economies that can be described
as capitalist.In many instances,
perhaps all in fact, there are traditional, cultural, religious, or legal
constraints on the functioning of markets.To give just one example that is historically significant to this
discussion, in the European middle ages, much town or city based craft
production was organized into and regulated by guilds --formal organizations of
men working in the same craft, such as silver smiths, gold smiths, furniture
makers, and so forth.The guilds
maintained elaborate systems of restrictions, enforced by law, on who could ply
those trades, under what conditions and for what wages workers could work for
them, what objects they could make, where they could sell them, and what prices
they were required to charge.In some
cases, these guilds grew quite large and entered into association with other
guilds, the Hanseatic League being the most important and well-known.

The phrase "free trade" refers in the first
instance to the historically important effort to remove some of those
restrictions, so that anyone who wished could enter a sphere of production,
using whatever techniques he chose, hiring whomever he chose, selling where he
wished and at whatever price he wished.[I use the masculine pronouns
to convey the fact that at the time we are talking about, the guilds were
restricted to men, and most of the early non-guild undertakings, though by no
means all, were begun by men.]

But while the removal of legal, customary, and other restrictions
on market exchange was an important pre-condition for the development of what
we now call capitalism, it was by no means identical with capitalism, and the
kind of relatively unfettered market exchange that I am talking about can be
found in many economies that were not capitalist in their organization.

So if capitalism is not free trade simpliciter, what is it?We
shall find out tomorrow.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.